Now
that academics in the U.S. and Canada have thoroughly assimilated the ideas of
Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, they are turning to other French thinkers
of the same generation, most notably Gilles Deleuze. The interest of Deleuze for
cultural studies, political theory and philosophy is not hard to explain.
Deleuze not only developed a highly original "philosophy of difference" (particularily
in his magnum opus, Difference and Repetition), but he did so by
relying on a very unusual conjunction of philosophers: not only such standard
60s references as Nietzsche, Marx and Blanchot, but also philosophers who had
more or less been consigned to the history of philosophy: Spinoza, Leibniz and
Henri Bergson. From Bergson, Deleuze draws a theory of time and memory that
links freedom with a cosmic and unconscious force of becoming, and the central
idea of "the virtual." The fortuitous resonances of the very idea of the virtual
with current notions of "virtual reality," and the ways in which Deleuze
connects this with a "philosophy of life" that transcends the divide between
human and non-human, makes Deleuzian philosophy a "natural" for media theorists,
particularily those concerned with the complex ways in which modern
mechanization/cybernetics affect human life and culture.

Which
brings me to D.N. Rodowick's recent study of Deleuze's film theory. In large
part, Rodowick offers an exposition of Deleuze's two books on film, Cinema 1:
The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Rodowick contends
that Deleuze's film theory offers new and different perspectives, which have
been largely ignored thanks to the dominance of phenomenological and
structuralist approaches to film. Not only does Deleuze offer an original
semiotics of film (complete with a rather complex armature of concepts and
typology of signs), but Deleuze's analysis of film elaborates a neo-Bergsonian
theory of time that is of direct cultural-political relevance. Like Deleuze's
own books, then, Rodowick's proceeds along two axes: that of an ontology of
time, and that of film analysis.

The
relation between time and film (or "cinema") is obvious and direct: films are
motion pictures, which not only physically move and unspool over time, but which
also depict and represent physical motion through space as a way of expressing
the passage of time (it's worth remembering that one of the first films depicted
a train arriving in a station). But Deleuze follows Bergson in arguing that the
motion of bodies through space fails to express the true nature of time. When
time is considered a function of physical objects moving through space, this is
because both space and time are taken to be homogeneous, linear, continuous and
rather static: each "space" into which an object moves is qualitatively
indistinguishable from the preceding and succeeding spaces, each moment of time
is a "temporal space" occupied by an object, connected in a linear fashion with
other moments that are qualitatively indistinguishable, and which succeed each
other in the manner of objects moving along an assembly line. On this view, all
spaces and moments are equivalent and interchangeable, distinguishable only
quantitatively (how big a space? how long a time?). Rather than expressing
movement, says Bergson, this theory does away with movement altogether: movement
is composed of inert spaces and moments, added onto one another end to end, like
matchsticks. This linear conception of time (Bergson calls it "the
spatialization of time") also stands at the basis of linear cause-effect
relations, and so subtends determinism, the doctrine in which every event is the
necessary and inevitable consequence of the events leading up to it. According
to Bergson, such a theory eliminates the possibility of freedom.

In
motion pictures, this linear conception of time is expressed in a number of
ways. When successive film frames are joined in such as way that the end of one
is the beginning of another, this creates an effect of temporal continuity (Deleuze
calls such linkage that of a "rational interval"); when the "out-of-frame"
implied by a shot is a space that would appear on film if the camera aimed
further left of right, this creates spatial continuity; if the incidents of the
film, no matter whether they are presented in chronological succession or are
intercut with "flash-backs" or "flash-forwards," can be united in a continuous
chain with a distinct beginning, middle and end, this creates narrative
continuity; when the audio aspect of the film is commensurate with the visual
aspect (for example, the sound is of Bogart and Bacall and the visual is a
close-up of their faces), then this establishes a unified audio-visual totality.
All of these feature in what Deleuze calls "classical cinema," the cinema of the
movement-image, where film presents or expresses time as a function of movement
(and hence indirectly). Of course, there is more to it than that, and Deleuze
(and Rodowick) go into considerable detail exploring the various nuances and
permutations of the classical style, from Keaton and Eisenstein, through French
impressionism, to Hitchcock.

According to Deleuze, though, cinema undergoes a powerful shift after the Second
World War. To explain this shift, we need to go back to Bergson. Bergson argues
that belief in linear time is a function of human psychology, and particularily
of our lower level psychic functions of stimulus-response, including habituated
or conditioned response. Perception reaches consciousnesses only after the mind
has subtracted from the percept all that is of no practical interest, namely,
everything irrelevant to a practical response in the form of action. This is
what Bergson calls the sensori-motor circuit, where perception is an interval
opened on the one side as sensation (stimulus) and closed on the other as action
(response), and affection is whatever cannot be converted to action-response,
but persists as a quality or state. Bergson, however, considers this circuit to
be a lower form of mind. He contrasts it with memory, or (since habit is also
memory), with a deep memory that goes beyond habit: the memory that the
attentive mind is able to move through freely, not as successive points on a
line, but as layers that are discontinuous but linked (a memory of childhood,
juxtaposed with a memory of last summer): which layer of memory is reached is a
function of choice (attention, effort), not conditioning or determinism. And
although there's no space to explain this in a short review, this profound
memory connects to the past: not an imagined or subjective past, but the past
itself. Conscious memory is then just an individual perspective on a
transpersonal memory that penetrates an immemorial past. Instead of time being a
series of successive existing presents, in which each present determines the
next, time is that of a present that passes and a past that is conserved, in
which the present is divided between the duration of its passing, the past it
will become, and its future becoming-past. The future, then, rather than being
determined by prior presents, is open and indeterminate, each present passing
into the past instead of pushing forward into the future. This is a time of
becoming, in which each moment is qualitatively distinct from every other in
virtue of the past and future that divide it, and each moment that arises is the
creative production of something new and unforeseeable. We have access to this
time through what Bergson calls "intuition," a mental act that can take place
only if the sensory-motor circuit is disrupted, overcome or shut down. In short,
we are required to think, and not merely react.

Again, this thumb-nail sketch of Bergsonism is incomplete, but adequate to
explain the transformation of time in post-war cinema. Beginning with Italian
neo-realism, says Deleuze, characters are portrayed as not being able to act, or
incapable of believing in the efficacy of action. They then become witnesses of
events, rather than agents, but witnesses no longer able to interpret or
perceive according to the pragmatic stimulus-response, action-reaction model.
The result is a disruption of linear time and of the unified self of agency.
Freed of the sensory-motor schema, time becomes non-linear: instead of the
rational interval connecting one shot to the next in a continuous line, there
are irrational intervals, a disjunction between successive shots that produces a
"false continuity" (Rodowick discusses the shot sequence of Resnais' Last
Year at Marienbad to illustrate the point: see pages 100-108): "the passage
between shots occurs as associative leaps in time rather than as the
chronological succesion of actions in space" (109). There are also disjunctions
between sound and image: what is spoken is what is not (or what cannot be)
seen, what is seen is what cannot be spoken (see the discussion of Claude
Lanzmann's Shoah, pages 145-149), or the "point of view" expressed by the
sound is incommensurate with that of the image, with no way of deciding which
"point of view" is more "true." All these disjunctions (of shots, or sound and
image, of points of view) are non-hierarchical (none is superior to the others)
and non-teleological (there is no resolution or cancellation of differences in a
final goal that subsumes them). Consequently, the gaps and intervals are not
filled by actions or narrative, but are connected by a non-linear becoming that
passes between disjuncts without unifying them. This, says Deleuze, gives
us a direct image of time, where the place in time occupied by people and things
is incommensurable with the space they occupy, and people and things are carried
off in an indefinite becoming-other that precludes the establishment of any
stable identity. In shattering identity and chronological-linear time, post-war
cinema opens up new possibilities, and in fact, opens us up to possibility as
such, the new as such, a future to come.

This
all very heady stuff, and indeed, Deleuze (and Rodowick) focus on films that are
self-consciously "intellectual": the films of Resnais, Godard, Pasolini,
Syberberg and the like. While Rodowick notes that Deleuze's view of cinema
"expresses a cultural elitism and snobbery" that many find distasteful, he never
really addresses the point. And while Rodowick also notes how Deleuze's
aspirations for film link him to the utopian promise of art in Adorno or Ernst
Bloch, he doesn't consider how old-fashioned and high modernist these theories
are: all of them believe in a "future" that will be superior to the present, and
that art's vocation is to tear viewers, readers or hearers away from the
banality of everyday life, providing insight into something deeper that will
awaken us to the unsatisfactory nature of things as they are. As Paul Valéry
once quipped, the future isn't what it used to be, and the revolutionary and
emancipatory promise of the avant-garde, if ever there was one, seems utterly
exhausted by now.

And
this takes me to a central defect of Rodowick's book: over 210 rather densely
written pages, Rodowick does little more than summarize and paraphrase Deleuze,
sometimes with illuminating comparisons with other theories, but all too often
through the repetition of Deleuzian catchphrases about simulacra, becoming, "the
outside farther than an exterior," and so on. Rodowick isn't helped much by the
carelessness with which the book was produced: in my copy, fully 16 pages of
text were missing (unless these were "irrational intervals" deliberately
inserted to disrupt the flow of the argument), and the photographic
reproductions of movie stills are rather shoddy (too small, often fuzzy or too
dark to make out). Rodowick's great strength is his discussion of particular
films: Last Year at Marienbad, Shoah, Senegalese director Ousmane
Sembene's Borom Sarret, Keaton's Sherlock Jr. Even here, however,
Rodowick often recapitulates Deleuze's own analyses.

The
point of Rodowick's book, one would think, would be to make clear Deleuze's very
difficult ideas to readers unfamiliar with Deleuze's work, but in that respect,
Rodowick often comes up short: his explanations of Deleuze are often as murky as
Deleuze himself, but without Deleuze's inventiveness and flair. Most readers
would probably be better served by turning directly to Deleuze's two cinema
books. As for the importance of these books, this lies more in the light they
shine on Deleuze's neo-Bergsonian theory of time (see page 83) than in Deleuze's
high modernist film aesthetic, which belongs to a time now long past.